In the wake of the greatest crime of the twenty-first century, the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, you might have thought that the days of passing off unattributed government and intelligence pronouncements as ‘journalism’ would be over. Apparently not. On June 14, the Sunday Times, owned by Rupert Murdoch, published what has already become a classic of the genre (behind a paywall; full text here).

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition has abandoned its promise to carry out an independent inquiry into Britain’s involvement in “extraordinary rendition”, detention”and torture carried out by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Instead, the inquiry will be undertaken by Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC), whose record is one of covering up the activities of the intelligence services.

Yesterday, for the first time, Britain’s three senior spy chiefs, the heads of MI5, MI6 and GCHQ, came before a public parliamentary committee. It was a unique opportunity shed some light onto the recent dubious goings-on in the British secret service.

The UK’s spy agency GCHQ was doing whatever it could to avoid igniting a “damaging public debate” and a subsequent possibility of a legal threat over its surveillance practices and cooperation with telecoms, new Snowden papers reveal.

Note: The Global Research website at globalresearch.ca as well as our French language site mondialisation.ca have experienced technical difficulties in the course of the last few days.

The site became inaccessible. Several important articles were no longer available. An earlier version of this article was posted on August 29, prior to the difficulties experienced by Global Research. The original version of this article is no longer accessible. GR Editor, M. Ch.*

This week, to coincide with the sixtieth anniversary of the CIA-MI6 overthrow of the democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran, Mohammad Mossaddegh, on 19th August 1953, the (US) National Security Archive has released documents confirming the details of the coup and the grubby US-UK involvement.(i)

Today’s scheduled televised questioning of the intelligence agencies by the UK parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee (ISC) has been cancelled and postponed, with no plausible explanation, until the autumn.

Journalist Steve Boggan had gate-crashed ‘Secret Work in an Open Society’, an invite only gathering organized by MI5’s then Director General Stephen Lander. Britain’s domestic security service, he found, was quietly offering to sell secrets to companies such as Rolls-Royce, BP, Ernst & Young, arms firm BAe Systems and to a bank since proven to be a multi-billion dollar money launderer HSBC.

It is not whether the individual had done anything wrong: it is whether the state has done anything wrong. Hague’s plea for the omniscient state is chilling: if you have done nothing wrong, then you have nothing to worry about. So it is alright for the state to eavesdrop all our social interactions, to follow our every move? Is there to be no privacy from the prying eye of the state, which can watch me on the toilet, and if I have done nothing wrong I have nothing to hide?

The brutal murder of an off-duty British soldier in broad daylight in the southeast London district of Woolwich raises new questions about the British government’s national security strategy, at home and abroad. Officials have highlighted the danger of “self-radicalizing” cells inspired by Internet extremism, but this ignores overwhelming evidence that major UK terror plots have been incubated by the banned al-Qaeda-linked group formerly known as Al Muhajiroun.

A recent letter to the London Review of Books has opened back up discussions about those responsible for the assassination of revolutionary Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Lumumba, a charismatic and popular organizer during the 1958-1960 period, captivated the hearts and minds of the majority of his people and the African continent during the struggle against Belgian colonialism.